Windows Vista to be launched in early October?

The Vista timeline indicates that the February beta of Vista concludes the beta phase for the operating system. Microsoft will continue on its roadmap with two release candidates RC0 and RC1, which are due in the week of April 10 and June 26, respectively. Microsoft is confident that it can prepare Vista within eight weeks of the release of RC1 for mass production: A release to manufacturing (RTM) is scheduled for the week of 14 August.

Microsoft apparently will miss some expectations of a third quarter release of Windows Vista. Sources told TG Daily that Microsoft is aiming for a global rollout in the first week of October (2 - 6 October). At launch date, Microsoft will also introduce DirectX9L (formerly named Windows Graphics Framework 1.0), the Vista upgrade for the multimedia driver, as well as DirectX 10 (WGF 2.0) and the Media Center Edition (MCE) of Vista. An update for DirectX (v10.1) will be released in the second half of 2007.